It’s been an article of faith for conservatives since before Lyndon Johnson’s celebrated War on Poverty was announced in 1964 that the goals of government social programs that benefit the poor should be geared toward helping the recipients of such aid achieve eventual independence so that they could live productive lives and contribute to society. What emerged from the flurry of legislation proposed by LBJ and his anti-poverty gurus was a nightmare of generational dependency that lowered self esteem, destroyed families, led to an epidemic of teenage pregnancy, and contributed to a breakdown in values that made recipients easy prey for the siren song of drug addiction and the criminal lifestyle. This has been the de rigueur of conservative critiques of the welfare state.

Condemning several generations of poor, mostly black people to lives of invisible desperation was forseen by one of the most thoughtful men of 20th century public life, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan made himself the bane of liberals and conservatives alike during his quarter century of service in the Senate. Prior to that, Moynihan had served in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations, putting his brilliant mind to work on the problems associated with poverty and dependence. George Will called him “the most penetrating political intellect to come from New York since Alexander Hamilton.”

Moynihan was the architect of many of the social safety net programs conservatives love to hate; relaxation of AFDC rules, WIC, housing subsidies, and changes in a vast array of existing social programs were all either proposed or strenuously backed by Moynihan during his service in government. But perhaps his greatest contribution came from a book he wrote in 1965 entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. In the starkest terms possible, Moynihan laid out the case not for the elimination of social programs helping the poor, but a redirecting of priorities that would end dependence and help the rapidly developing “underclass” (a term he coined) achieve independence from government. For daring to point out the bleak statistics for black families at the time, he was skewered by the more radical anti-poverty warriors who were moving government programs toward an entirely different goal; a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI).

Some of the statistics Moynihan used in his book were frightening; 26% of children born out of wedlock (a staggering 70% today), a divorce rate of 23% (nearly 70% today), and single parent households at nearly 40% for black familes (almost 80% today).

But Moynihan’s critique went beyond the numbers. His analysis went to the heart of the importance of family in any society:

More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.”

This kind of thinking eventually led Moynihan to another inescapable conclusion. By breeding dependence on government for subsistence, we will make it impossible for the poor to take care of themselves:

Millions of people, Moynihan notes, have for generations become accustomed to living outside the circle of social responsibility and economic productivity. Under the AFDC program alone, started sixty years ago to provide temporary help to a relative handful of widows and jobless women with children, well over half the families receiving benefits now begin as AFDC families. In almost all cases, these are women with children born out of wedlock, and Moynihan notes that “there are millions of families in just this circumstance.”

A major political problem, and it is also a compassion problem, is that most of the country is untouched by this catastrophe. Those who are on AFDC for a short time are more or less evenly distributed across the land, while those who are more or less permanently on the dole are concentrated in the cities. In 1993, Moynihan notes, 59 percent of the children in Atlanta, 66 percent in Cleveland, 55 percent in Miami, 57 percent in Philadelphia, and 66 percent in Newark were receiving AFDC. Most of these children and their mothers have never known and possibly will never know any other way of life than living on welfare. In many cases, the mothers and grandmothers of these mothers never knew anything but welfare.

In 1996 as Congress prepared for welfare reform, many conservatives believed that Moynihan would join an effort the Senator himself had been pushing for since he arrived in Washington 20 years earlier. Instead, Moynihan ended up issuing dire warnings that millions would become homeless as well as this prescient take on the effect of welfare reform on young, black males:

Young males of the welfare-dependent mainly black urban underclass “can be horrid to themselves, horrid to one another, horrid to the rest of us.” Dismantle the defense system of the welfare status quo and you loose them upon society.

Most revealingly and depressingly, Moynihan concludes his declaration by drawing an analogy with the “deinstitutionalization” of mental patients in the 1960s and 1970s. That fatal step resulted in the hundreds of thousands of “homeless” wandering our streets in alcoholic and drug-induced stupor. But most of them are not dangerous. The thugs who do “horrid things” carry knives and guns. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” according to Kennan, were ideological and nationalistic. The sources of welfare conduct, according to Moynihan, are in congenital criminality and general social incompetence. In both cases, there is nothing to be done for it except containment.

In short, Moynihan had gone from advocating independence for welfare recipients to pushing for “containing” the problem. In other words, maintaining the status quo.

For containment is precisely what the government had been doing since at least 1968 when the blue ribbon panel charged with investigating the urban riots that nearly destroyed the inner cities in the late 1960’s cited “two Americas” as the major cause of black frustration and anger. Headed up by former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, the Commission determined that virulent white racism was the cause of black rioting and that the solution was radical income redistribution.

What happened next was again predicted by conservatives. In order to oversee this income redistribution, a huge bureaucracy was created along with an alphabet soup of agencies that worked hand in hand with a growing number of anti-poverty NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations) – including groups like the Black Panthers and the notorious Black P-Stone Nation in Chicago who were little more than street gangs. In effect, the federal government was involved in a protection racket believing that they were solving the income inequity problem of black versus white by creating dependence.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. All these income distribution schemes did was hasten the destruction of the black family which led to a vicious cycle of more dependency, more frustration, and more anger. Even the welfare reform of the 1990’s did little to change what had become a national shame; a permanent underclass unable to escape the ravages of poverty. Millions of young men have grown up, lived, fought, and died in the streets who didn’t have to all because the compassion merchants and anti-poverty bullies have failed to grasp the debilitating effects of dependence on government and the causal relationship between that dependence and the “otherness” felt by African Americans in general but especially by young black men.

This feeling of being separate takes many forms. In education, it has created a culture where black achievement is frowned on by some lest a student appear too “white.” It has also created seperate ideals with regards to employment, relationships, and neighborhood.

Has dependence also created a separate attitude on the part of the underclass toward the law?

The explosion of anarchy and mayhem in New Orleans will be studied for years and answers may never be found. But whatever the reason, it goes far beyond a “few malcontents” taking advantage of a lack of law enforcement. If it were a small number, it wouldn’t take 15,000 National Guardsmen to restore some semblance of order. Nor would people out for a lark be shooting at helicopters evacuating desperately sick people from hospitals. Something much deeper was at work in New Orleans, something beyond the disaster, beyond even the harsh and reportedly brutal treatment of young black men by the New Orleans Police Department in the past.

An economic determinist would point out that the looters were lashing out at whites by stealing their possessions and engaging in other criminal acts. This was what the Kerner Commission found back in 1968. The problem with that assumption is that cities have changed dramatically in the last 40 years. Where New Orleans used to have a majority of white people as citizens it is now 2/3 black. The people have elected a black Mayor. A black Police Superintendent has been named. Black elected officials permeate the government. The question then arises; if nearly 70% of the population is black in a city run by a black government, why were so many involved in lawless activity?

Clearly, race is not the answer. There must be something else at work besides color. Part of the explanation must be this “otherness” felt by young black men who have different perception of the law and how it doesn’t apply to them. Growing up as they have in a totally dependent environment where food, shelter, clothing – life itself – is dispensed by a formless, shapeless government, they have carved out a separate existence to achieve a twisted kind of independence and freedom. It’s all they’ve got.

Do we have the courage to discuss this otherness issue without the usual namecalling into which every single conversation regarding race degenerates? Jeff Goldstein has a challenge:

Rich Lowry [of NRO] sees the writing on the wall and is wary of what he presumes will be the “toxic and unhealthy” “post-catastrophe debate.” But I welcome it, suspecting as I do that any attempt to racialize this catastrophe will result—after the inevitable and necessary public debate—in a huge setback to the identity politics movement.

Bring it on.

Since the beginning of the republic we’ve failed to talk about the issue of race. If indeed the hurricane strips away the politics that prevent such a discussion, I’m all for it. As Goldstein says… Bring it on.